INTRODUCTION
Maintaining a happy and joyous workforce is crucial
to the progress of any organization. More so, the productivity of any
organization is largely determined by the quality of its personnel and how the
organization is able to develop them. . Any knowledge after five years may
become obsolete if nothing new is added to it; this is due to the rate of the
global technological advancement, research and new discoveries.
The idea
underlying human resource development in any sector, including the education
sector is how best to keep employees current, vibrant and versatile so that
they can continuously perform their roles effectively in the rapid
socio-economic, political, scientific and technological changes and
globalization. Peretomode and Chukwuma (2014) opined that in education,
teachers are the foundation of quality; they hold thrust for implemented
curriculum of formal education and therefore, are at the centre of the
education process. No education system can rise above the quality of its
teachers (Federal Republic of Nigeria, 2004). Building a solid academic staff
development programme influences the realization of the college mission
statement. Employee development refers to the human resource development
programmes designed to enhance the value of employees after they have joined
the organization. This includes employee training, orientation promotion,
mentoring, seminars and workshop among others. Thus it is the series of
activities embarked upon by an organization that leads to knowledge or skills
acquisition for growing purposes.
Colleges of
Education in Nigeria are institutions that train the trainers’ as they are
responsible for the production of teachers for the Basic Education and
Secondary School levels. The colleges as stated in the Colleges of Education
Act (Decree of (1986) are to perform the followings:
a.
provide full time
courses in the teaching, instruction and training in (i) technology, applied
science, humanities and management. (ii) Such other fields of applied learning
relevant to the development of Nigeria;
b. conduct courses in
education for qualified teachers;
c.
arrange
conferences, seminars and workshop relative to the field of learning specified
in paragraph a of this section; and
d. its performance function as in the opinion of the council
may sense to promote the objectives of the college (FRN 1986).
The Nigeria Certificate in Education is the
basic qualification for teaching in Nigeria; it is a sub-degree (certificate
course) and a professional teacher diploma which is obtained after three years full-time
at the college of education. LASSA (2000), observed that there has been greater
awareness that teachers who were trained some few years ago are not adequately
equipped for effective teaching except complemented by in-service training.
The need for
lecturers in colleges of education to improve their knowledge, skills, attitude
and behaviours while on the Job is more critical now in the developing nation
like Nigeria than ever before for a number of reasons. For example, academic
programmes in colleges rarely adequately
prepare students as finished products for their future position as teachers and
their accompanying responsibilities (Pretomode (2001), Pertomde and Chukwuma
(2014). Moreover, the issue of quality assurance to ensure credibility of certification
is essential in teacher production.
Furthermore,
the higher the quality of teachers produced by the colleges of education, the
faster the rate of growth and development and achievement of the basic
education goals as well as Millennium Development Goals (MDGS). Schools
planning to deliver virtual instruction should invest considerable resources in
identifying, training, and supporting teachers, (National School Boards
Association, 2002, p. 13). It is understandable that to undertake a new medium
for delivering instruction, teachers need to be provided the necessary training
to utilize the new opportunities to ensure student success. Staff development
is the key to increasing student achievement through the improvement of
teachers’ skills and abilities. A successful staff development programme is
cyclic in nature. This ongoing process must be collaborative in nature
involving teachers, administrators and stakeholders. Schools and school
administrators must align their student learning goals and curriculum with
state requirements and then analyze the student achievement data to determine
deficiencies in student learning. Once the problem areas are identified,
research should be used to determine which effective and efficient
instructional strategies would produce the desired results.
Needs
assessment will determine which teachers possess these skills and which do not.
It is expected that staff development would be varied to meet the individual
skills and readiness levels of the teachers. Using the data, a comprehensive
and cohesive staff development plan can be developed, implemented, and
evaluated. Schools can never be satisfied with the level of students’
achievement and to improve, they must constantly cycle through the process of
evaluating goals and data, reviewing research, and modifying staff development
to address needs to increase student achievement.
Staff
development is a process of enhancing the capacity of teachers to be effective
and efficient in their ability to accomplish the predetermined objectives of
the school system. It is directed
towards the improvement of teachers and the focus should be areas where
skills are inadequate. It is also for the purpose of upgrading and bridging the
gaps with much interest to provide the need for creativity and flexibility in
academic activities. In other words, ability is stimulated thereby creating an
environment in which it becomes easier to explore, becoming more proactive and
commands changes in the organization. Hence varieties of development programmes
are initiated in the school system to ascertain the objectives of the National
Policy on Education. In Nigerian Colleges of Education (COE), staff development
programmes refer to opportunities provided for staff to increase their
knowledge, skills, experiences and understanding thereby improving their job
performances. These opportunities, according to the National Commission for
Colleges of Education (NCCE) (2008) include educational programmes such as
Bachelor in Education (B. Ed), Post Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE),
Master of Education (M. Ed), Doctor of Philosophy (Ph. D), and Higher National
Diploma (HND). Others include short training courses such as conferences,
seminars and workshops; writing of articles in educational journals; sabbatical
leave and induction training programmes for newly employed staff.
In addition
to these programmes, staff in Nigerian Colleges of Education are also exposed
to various activities such as staff meetings at various levels, serving in
different college committees, coaching by more experienced staff and working on
delegated authorities. These activities are deliberately planned to develop
staff professionally and to encourage them to achieve job satisfaction (Mathis
and Jackson, 2006). For instance, in-service
training programme represents a veritable medium which aims at correcting
certain deficiencies in order to accelerate technological advancement through
the educational system. More so workshops, conferences and seminars serve as an
effective measure of dissemination of information concerning academic practice.
It is a form of networking, exchange of ideas and, reflects on other’s opinions
which strengthen inter-institutional collaboration, increase publication
records and development of career path endowment. In academic fields, it is
said that the total of human knowledge is doubling every five or ten years
(John, 1998). It is thus almost impossible for an individual staff member to
remain in touch with the subject without a conscious investment in scholarship
and self-tuition. When these knowledge advances are allied to similar changes
in pedagogy, learning materials development and the use of technology, the
scale of self-improvement required becomes massive. (John, 1998). This
situation calls for training and development in colleges of education.
Lecturers do
not perform to the expected standards and neither do they seem to address the
needs of students and other stakeholders. Their performance is still less
satisfactory than the expected standards and consequences have been predictable
as there are rising concerns over poor coverage of students’ projects and
course content, delayed examination results and missing marks, poor
administration of examinations, poor lecturer-student interaction, deteriorating
academic performance and reduced levels of research and publications quality
and as a result, academic standards and performance among students are not
encouraging. More so the public and employers are not comfortable with the
quality of NCE graduate teachers in both basic education and secondary schools.
This situation requires investigation to know whether lecturers are given
needed training and development to meet up their challenges.
In recent
years, Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND) has expended a lot of money on
staff development in tertiary institutions in Nigeria. In 2014 alone, according
to the secretary of Tertiary Education Trust Fund, TETFUND spent 19 billion
naira on staff development (People’s Daily, 2014). Still there are complaints
from the public about the quality of NCE graduates in Nigeria. The public,
students and other stakeholders are complaining that colleges of education
lecturers are not performing to the expected standards and neither do they seem
to address the needs of students and other stakeholders... For example,
academic programmes in colleges rarely adequately prepare students as finished
products for their future position as teachers and their accompanying
responsibilities (Pretomode (2001), Pertomde and Chukwuma (2014). Moreover, the
issue of quality assurance to ensure credibility of certification is essential
in teacher production.
The use of modern teaching techniques to
handle large class size and the information and technology systems in teaching
seem to be a challenge to some lecturers in this modern age. This motivates the
researcher to investigate into the staff development programmes in Colleges of
Education in the North - Central Geographical Zone of Nigeria.
Teachers’
efficacy and performance are often at the centre of attention in educational
institution, the challenges experienced in most colleges of education include
large students’ enrolments and globalization of education with inherent
competition for staff and students.
Thus, each academic staff member is required to prove his/her
credibility based on strength and magnitude of his/her research activities,
teaching, and consultancy services among others’ capabilities. Mentoring in
colleges of education is basically not practicable due to workload; senior
lecturers hardly have time to mentor the younger ones.
In local conferences, many lecturers used to
send their work through other colleagues and this is not supposing to be so as
the main reason for conferences are to enable participants discover new
knowledge and innovations in Education and to relate with other professional in
the field, even when lecturers attend themselves, they hardly wait till the end
of the conference. Furthermore, some lecturers see attending conference abroad
as an opportunity to travel outside not minding the relevance of the conference
to their primary assignment. The importance of academic staff professional
development cannot be over emphasized.
In spite of its apparent advantages, there are still many employers particularly
in state colleges of education management who do not commit sufficient funds to
the development of their staff. Understandably most staff of colleges of
education appears to have positive belief about the usefulness of training and
development and would want to engage in them personally (Paretomode and
Chukwuma 2014).
Another
challenge is the issue of condition for accessing training funds. Most
lecturers and institutions could not meet up with the guideline for accessing
the funds from TETFUND in terms of research proposals and books thereby leaving
billions of naira unused. This situation was a major concern for the executive
secretary, Prof Bogoro, when he lamented that one of the major challenges
confronting the agency was the inability of some tertiary institutions across
the country to access more than N67 billion of the funds (Muhammad, 2014).
Research Questions
The
following research questions were asked to guide the study:
1.
What is the impact of in-service training programme on
the job performance of academic staff of colleges of education in the
North-Central Geographical Zone?
2.
In what way does mentoring impact on the job performance
of academic staff of Colleges of Education in the North-Central Geographical
Zone?
3.
How does orientation programme impact on the job
performance of academic staff of colleges of education in the North-Central
Geographical Zone?
4.
In what way does academic staff participation in
conferences impact on their job performance in the North-Central Geographical
Zone?
METHODOLOGY
The research
design for this study was a descriptive survey design, particularly the
cross-sectional survey design. The population of the study comprises all
management staff, 3642 academic staff and union officials of the fifteen (15) Colleges
of Education in North-Central Geographical Zone of Nigeria. North-central has
ten (10) State Colleges of education, four (4) Federal Colleges of Education
and FCT College of Education Zuba. The management staff in this research
includes the, Principal officials (Provost, Deputy provost, College Liberian,
Deans Head of Departments) who are the head of academics in the institution.
The sample for the study consisting of 121 management staff, 444 academic staff
and 21 union officials from the sampled Colleges of Education, were used. Eight
(8) Colleges were sampled i.e four Federal Colleges and four State Colleges in
the North-Central Geographical Zone. The sample was selected through simple
random sampling technique. The main instrument used for this study was a
structured questionnaire developed by the researcher for the study. The
questionnaire was adopted because of its relevance to the issues raised in the
research. The mean statistics and standard deviation were used to analyse
research questions one to eight. The decision rule for the mean of each
response was 3.00 and above for acceptance.
The responses of the respondents on the
Impact of conferences on the job performance of academic staff of Colleges of Education
in North-central geographical zone of Nigeria revealed that participation in
conference had a positive impact on the job performance of academic staff. The
responses revealed that through conferences academic staff learnt how to plan
their lesson well and this enables them to perform better in the class, this
idea was supported by a mean score of 4.05 also the respondents believed that
through conferences, academic staff master their subjects with a mean score of
4.00 and standard deviation of 0.901, the results also revealed that through
conferences, academic staff learnt how to control their classes and this
enhanced their performances in the class with the mean score of 3.90 and
standard deviation of 0.931. The
findings also revealed that through conferences, academic staff learnt how to
introduce and present lessons and these helped in improving their performance,
they also agreed that through conferences, academic staff learnt questioning
technique, which helped to improve their performances in the class.
CONCLUSIONS
Based
on the findings of the study, the following conclusions were drawn:
1.
In-service
training had a positive impact on the job performance on academic staff of Colleges
of Education in North-central geographical zone, Nigeria, that through
in-service training academic staff learn many teaching skills;
2.
With regard
to the impact of mentoring on the job performance of academic staff of Colleges
of Education results shows that mentoring enhanced the job performance of
academic staff.
3.
Findings
showed that orientation programmes had capacity to improve academic staff job
performance that through orientation academic staff learns how to control their
classes, overcome anxiety and other skills that improve their job performance;
4.
Also
participation of academic staff in conferences had improved their job
performance in many areas of their duties because it broaden their knowledge of
their teaching subjects, boost their morale, how to carryout formative evaluation
and other teaching skills like controlling their classes, communicate
effectively in and outside the classroom;
RECOMMENDATIONS
The following recommendations were made on
the basis of the findings and conclusions of this study:
1.
In order to adequately meet the aims of staff
development, employers and their managers need to provide within the framework
of agreed policies, a wide range of developmental opportunities for all
categories of staff. Such opportunities should include well-organised
in-service education and training in a climate in which staff feel that they
are being adequately supported in professional and resource terms;
- To
increase the chances of success, mentoring programme should be clearly linked
to the existing staff development policies and practices so as to increase
its chances of being supported by the participants core components of the
programme (objectives guidelines, training, education, monitoring and
evaluation), should be designed for effectiveness rather than expediency
and voluntary participation and flexible guidelines should be encouraged.
If colleges of education encourage mentoring programmes, it may
significantly promote their effectiveness;
3.
Orientation for newly employed staff should be planned in
such a way that they must undergo at resumption, this should be well
structured, monitored and evaluated since it can improve staff performance on
their job;
4.
Academic staff should be encouraged to attend conferences
regularly and should be encouraged to participate in it not only for promotion
sake but to help their performance in the class;
REFERENCES
Federal Republic of Nigeria, (2004). National Policy on Education. Lagos,
govt press
John, F. (1998). Higher Education Staff Development: A continuing mission. Paris:
Commonwealth
Lassa, P. (2000). Teacher production: a focus on Nigeria in the state of education in Nigeria. Jos Excellence
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Mathis, R. L. & Jackson, J. H. (2006). Human
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Muhammad,T.(2014,September,16) TETFund
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Agency of Nigeria.
Peretomode, V. F., & Chukwuma, R. A.
(2013). Manpower development and lecturer productivity in tertiary institutions
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